Duty

Two things  came together yesterday.

I was researching Albert Ball VC for the very jolly communitywings_n_wires (which honours the planes and pilots of WWI.)  Ball was a sweet and madly brave young man  who, when he wasn't downing German planes, cultivated vegetables in a little garden he'd made on base. Writing home, he would say things like , "Oh, won't it be nice when all this beastly killing is over, and we can just enjoy ourselves and not hurt anyone. I hate this game, but it is the only thing one must do just now...When I am happy I dig in the garden and sing."

Later I was watching a documentary film about the first intifada. Young Israeli servicemen were voicing exactly the same sentiments as Ball:- it's mad that we're guarding these settlers whose ideology we hate, but it's what we have to do and we wouldn't have it any other way. They were filmed singing a song about how when their tour was over they'd go and dance and smoke joints on a beach in Goa.

War is this tribal thing. People get locked into it. They hate what they're doing, acknowledge its pointlessness, but believe it's their duty to carry on. Duty becomes a value that over-rides every other moral consideration.

Perhaps genetic scientists will one day be able to switch off this "Duty" gene. Would there be worldwide moral collapse if they did ?

 

Captain Kidd

I've been waiting over a year for the new Waterson:Carthy album, Fishes and Fine Yellow Sand- mainly so's I could hear Eliza Carthy sing Captain Kidd again.

The tune is one that serves several sets of lyrics. In all of them a (deceased) villain tells us about his mis-spent life. The version I heard first (decades ago) was one that Peter Sellers (of all people) sang on TV. Seller's villain was a chap called Sam Hall and the last verse went something like this.

And now in Heaven I dwell,
In Heaven I dwell
And now in Heaven I dwell
In Heaven I dwell,
And now in Heaven I dwell
And it is a bloody sell:
All the whores are down in Hell,
Damn their eyes!

Even in Sellers' comic, music-hall version the song is oddly moving. In Waterson:Carthy's performance- with an authentic historical figure as the subject (Kidd was hung for piracy in 1701) it becomes eerie and tragic. The female singer channels the dead pirate; On some plane of the multiverse she is in love with him. The refrain, "as I sailed, as I sailed" gives the song a dreamlike quality- as though all the sea battles and murders happened by chance along the way- as though the sailing (to nowhere in particular) was the main point of Kidd's life.

The time we saw the band, live at Salford's Lowry Centre, Eliza was in tears before she reached the end.